At least judging by how many Purde’s and Reholt’s live in Estonia. Which makes perfect sense. I mean, Purde is perhaps not your dream surname (it’s a bitch to pronounce in English) but at least it beats Reholt by a mile. And Übi. A nifty feature this, surname popularity matching by Kindo.
I’ve almost always liked my job anyway but things have changed. Now this is true passionate love.
This statement may appear a bit out of place, especially coming from someone on vacation. So let me explain. A few days ago at a friend’s magnificent country house in the middle of hills of South Estonia I wanted to do some good old manual labour. A pile of wood that needed cutting and chopping seemed like a good object.
The first hour felt awesome. The pile of wood was shrinking, sun was shining, a nice wood stack was forming and I felt this romantic connectedness to generations before me that had to do this in order to stay warm in the winter.
In the second hour the back started to ache and I felt more connected to the mosquitos biting me than to past generations.
By the end of third hour I felt a bit stupid. I had volunteered to something I was sick and tired of but the job was not done yet. Technically I could have just put the tools down and returned to the hammock but that would have left something I had said I’d do undone. So I kept fighting that pile of wood with a chainsaw and an axe with rage and anger. This was personal. This wooden monster needed to be killed.
Then somehow my mind drifted to some quite boring work task and I felt this warm pleasant feeling. How fortunate I am that I don’t have to cut and chop wood every day. I have a nice desk, conveniently mosquito and splinter free and my computer doesn’t have a chain than needs sharpening. My job is talking to people, writing stuff and reading what other people have written. How good is that! I love it!
So there you go. On Monday I can return to the office, loving my job. And the long weekend midsummer’s night party, lake Võrtsjärv with wakeboarding and kiteboarding, endless sauna and seeing old friends was not too shabby either.
On this picture – sauna next to the crime scene.
Sorry for this misleading title. This post is not about showing off my latest purchase but the lack of a suitable gadget. I’ve been looking for a suitable replacement for my Sony Ericsson w810i for quite some time now. It still works, but the surface has lost so much of its former glory due to intense use that sometimes small children start to cry when I take my phone out in a public place. Also, I’ve had enough of carrying around a Blackberry for the occasions I want to read email on the go (that’s most days). And because I still use my Estonian number when I’m in that glorious country I’ve learned to hate the process of changing SIM cards more and more.
So here’s my spec – something that can handle email, two SIM cards and the easy task of not looking like a diesel engine. Touch screens, video and the rest would be nice extras but they wouldn’t solve my tiny problems. Surely there’s a phone like that out there, I though. How wrong I was.
Because the big boys need to play nice with the mobile operators only second and eighteenth tier companies offer dual sim phones. There is one Samsung model available, true, but I would rather do email with one of their vacuum cleaners than a keyboard that tiny. Most of the other dual sim phones out there list polyphonic ringtones quite high on their feature list which is a good illustration of what useless crap these are. And some of them require a magic stick or pen or whatever that thing is to use. I mean, we live in the era or space travel and nanobots. You shouldn’t need a ghost of a pen to send an SMS. I refuse to link to these … objects from this blog so you’re going to have to take my word for it.
So here I go, after spending an hour or two on intense research I just added another half an hour to write about that waste of time. All I can do is hope people reading this know more about buying phones than I do. Or at least that they would look at my old phone with a bit more understanding and sympathy, the next time they see me use it.
Randy Pausch is dying. But in the process, he’s teaching millions of people about living – Time. Need I say more?
Sometimes comments have a lot more substance than actual posts. Take this one by Rene with the theory that Swiss German and Estonian share some influences from German that have been forgotten in the original language. Surely that’s a possibility. Then again, because of very colorful historical Estonian as a language is a whore (not to be misinterpreted – I like Estonian a more than anyone, I’m just stating the obvious here) that has influences from English, Russian, Finnish, German, Swedish, Dutch and every other language on the planet except Swahili.
Oh, and in case anyone wants to learn that language with low moral standards, here are my materials from my extremely successful Estonian class:
So went to see Cans festival yesterday. It’s a collaboration by Banksy and about 40 other stencil artists in an alleyway by Waterloo station.
Now, I don’t want to pretend to know much about that sort of thing. I’ve just always liked good graffiti and hated the bad kind. The notion I got yesterday was that this is as contemporary as contemporary art can get. When still as school I quite liked reading an article or a whole book about a painting we were studying at the time in order to ‘get it’. But this was not by a 17th century Italian artist. These dudes walk the streets I walk (technically) which made this ‘excibition’ extremely enjoyable.
Even my old calculator/phone/camera captured some really cool stuff. I mainly shot weird details as bigger pieces are covered by dozens of guys with huge cameras already. I can’t wait for Taavet to get his stuff out of his cam.
I started the week in Amsterdam with an unbelievably enjoyable long weekend trip. The moment I stepped out from the cab to enter the apartment we had rented on Prinsengracht I remembered just how much I like that city. For me Amsterdam combines the virtues of a big city (sights, food, entertainment, connectedness) and a small city (coziness, little need to plan ahead, not that expensive, freedom to bike) in a way that I haven’t seen anywhere else. So very gesellig! Plus I quite like the simple directness of the Dutch and the perverse beauty of the language. I suspect some day there may be a vol 2 coming to the four months I spent studying there.
If you haven’t been yet, book now and thank me later.
Have you ever struggled explaining your grandparents what you do for living?
– So, what do you do for work?
– I work in marketing
– Well, yes, but what do you do?
– I sort of get in in the morning, open my computer, read what other people have written me and write back, talk to people, attend a few meetings and then go home.
– But what do you do for work?
That thing. And this is not even trying to explain what user journey marketing is. Even most of my friends need a lengthy explanation, or just give up. How lucky I am then that at least for some time I can actually explain what I do. Meet Skype’s new subscriptions.
It was pure bliss to work with incredibly smart and fast working people on messaging and promotion of these. Even better, people seem to like the product. It helps to talk about the weather (or what the dog ate for breakfast) in grater detail than has ever been possible before for millions of people around the world that still like their landlines. How nice is that!
I am looking forward to the next conversation with my grandparents.
Just testing widgets here. You keep calm and carry on.
… says Rene in this brilliant post about excessive business travelling and home as such. On that subject he’s definitely in the know. It’s a good read even if you don’t spend most of your time in hotel beds and dodgy hangouts.